The Russian justice ordered this Wednesday the dissolution of the Memorial Human Rights Center, one day after the decision of the Supreme Court of ban the central structure of this emblematic organization, sparking international outrage.
After studying the prosecution’s request, the judge Mikhail Kazakov ordered the dissolution of Memorial Human Rights Center, who campaigns against rights abuses in present-day Russia and has also testified to the history of the victims of Stalinism.
On Tuesday, justice had ordered the closure of Memorial International, the central structure that coordinates the organization’s network in Russia and its regional antennas, arguing that it does not respect the obligations of its statute of “Foreign agent”.
This label, reminiscent of that of “Enemy of the people” In Soviet times, it was reserved for internationally funded organizations that allegedly act against Russian interests.
The Prosecutor’s Office insisted during the process that the Memorial Human Rights Center repeatedly violated the requirements of Russian law on “foreign agents” on its websites and on social media, to which the NGO replied that it paid in due time and form all the fines imposed for that cause.
“We will always (…) appeal any decision of the court that is not in our favor. First in the national courts. In case of need we will go to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) “announced to the Russian press Yan Rachinski, co-founder of the organization.
He recalled that Memorial already addressed the ECHR after the NGO was declared a “foreign agent” in 2012.
“The view of the case did not move from the standstill. We will simply add the appeal to the existing appeal “, He said.
The Center’s lawyer, Mikhail Biriukov, he told the Russian agency Interfax that the defense did not hear from the Prosecutor’s Office what were the legal rights and interests that the NGO violated and what were the damages caused by its activities.
“We consider the verdict on the liquidation totally disproportionate with respect to the violations that were highlighted by the Prosecutor’s Office in the lawsuit”, he pointed.
Diplomats from Spain, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, USA Y Germany, according to TASS.
This Tuesday the Supreme Court of Russia ordered liquidation of International Memorial to create “A false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state.”
The Russians awarded the Peace Nobel, Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) and Dmitri Muratov (2021), wrote to the Prosecutor’s Office in November to withdraw the lawsuit against Memorial.
Gorbachev and Murátov stressed that Memorial’s activities since its founding in 1991 have been aimed at the restoration of historical justice and preserving the memory of hundreds of thousands of reprisals during the Soviet Union.
Memorial accuses the Kremlin and to the security organs of the State of try to prevent further investigation of crimes committed during the USSR and since 1991especially since the current president, Vladimir Putin, came to power in 2000.
The NGO, which received the Sakharov Prize of the European Parliament in 2009 and has been a candidate on several occasions for the Nobel Peace Prize, counts among its founders the Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, father of the hydrogen bomb and precursor of the defense of human rights in this country.
(With information from EFE and AFP)
Keep reading:
The story of Memorial, the human rights organization that stood up to the Russian authorities and was shut down
Putin’s Supreme Court ordered the closure of Memorial, an NGO emblem of individual freedoms in Russia
Source-www.infobae.com